The first assignment was to create a five sentence short story. Here is mine…

Paul and Maribeth sat in the small church holding hands and praying that someone would find their daughter alive. Maribeth mentally retraced their morning, trying to find some clue as to where Elizabeth could be. Paul looked at their intertwined hands and said, “I only left her alone for a moment.” Shocked, Maribeth left the church and headed toward the center of town. She found Elizabeth at the corner of 5th and Maple buying an ice cream cone from a vendor Maribeth had never seen before.

I’m sure this seems to neatly tied up at the end but it’s just meant to be the framework of the story, establishing the setting, characters, conflict, plot, a secret, and the resolution.

In this week-long course, under the guidance of One Story’s own editor in chief Hannah Tinti, you’ll build a short story from scratch, learning the ins and outs of storytelling structure along the way. New lessons—in video or text—will be shared daily, but exercises can be done on your own time, and an active message board will allow you to communicate with fellow students and ask questions. For complete details and to register, visit www.one-story.com (look under “events” and then “online classes”).

This is an amazing opportunity to learn from one of the best editors in the business!

One Story is a top-tier literary journal celebrating the best in short stories, novel excepts, and stories for teens (One Teen Story). Once a year, they celebrate the authors coming out with a debut novel who have appeared in their journal – it’s a big arse Brooklyn-style party and tickets are selling fast.

Not only does this party sound super fun, but the One Story folks are some of the nicest, most accessible people I have met. This an amazing opportunity to have a blast while meeting some of the most influential people in the literary world. Wowza!

The Ball is being held on Thursday, May 22nd, at the Roulette in Brooklyn from 7p – 11p.

I’m back with another review. This time it’s for Grammarly – an editorial program. (Just as an FYI, I was not compensated for this review – other than being given a free two-week trial to test things out. Otherwise…ahem…no review because how would I know if it works.)

This is actually a pretty cool program. You upload or cut/paste a document into Grammarly and it analyzes it for you, giving you feedback in a number of areas, like:

spelling

passive voice

commonly confused words

split infinitives

vocabulary use

capitalization

verb use/tense

confusing modifiers

split infinitives

wordiness

This is an excellent program for reaching beyond spell check and evaluating the basics of writing. It catches those supposedly simple mistakes that we all make.

A huge bonus is that it can also evaluate your text for plagiarism. This is a terrific feature because not only does it tell you if your text matches other text, it also gives you 3 different formats for citing your sources. The text I used had a quote from the internet and Grammarly found it and formatted the MLA, APA, and Chicago Style Manual citations for me. (Seriously, where was this little gem when I was in college?)

As you might imagine, there are some limitations of the program because it is, after all, a computer program and it can’t have a sense of voice or understand creativity in sentence structure. But it is a very valuable second set of eyes to catch the mistakes we as writers/students don’t see because, when we edit ourselves, we tend to see what is supposed to be there rather than what is there.

Here is a screen shot of their sample document.

It’s great to have all of these tools in one place.

So now, you are probably wondering how much it costs. Here’s the breakdown from their FAQ page…

Grammarly offers a seven-day free trial, as well as the following subscription plans:

You do have to enter a credit card number for the free trial and your subscription will start automatically (and your credit card will be charged) on the 7th day, unless you cancel your subscription before then.

It’s a little pricey but would quickly prove a valuable resource for students and writers. Go check it out – www.Grammarly.com.

November is the month when many novelists commit to writing at least 1,667 words per day – every single day of the month. It’s called National Novel Writing Month – yes, we writers are a creative bunch coming up with such a clever title as that. The acronym is NaNoWriMo – which doesn’t make us look so clever . (Seriously – I’m not even sure how you say that.) Most people just shorten it to NaNo.

I’m taking on this challenge – so please wish me luck! If you are interested in participating, you can sign up to record your progress and connect with the other 300,000 authors doing the same thing at the website www.nanowrimo.org. If you meet the challenge of writing 1,667 words per day, at the end of the month, you will have written 50,000 words – nearly a novel.

Today my journey begins. This morning I got up, got the kids out the door, and took a shower. I even got dressed like a normal person who leaves the house every day. I figured if I got dressed as if I were going to work, I might actually work. Then I even put on makeup and proceeded to spill lipgloss on the sweet little ruffle on my fancy cream-colored shirt. Fabulous. ergh.

Then I went to the potty – and got some snacks ready – and turned off Twitter and Facebook . Now I have no excuses for getting up from this chair.

The famous “they” say that the biggest key to being successful this month is to just write – no editing – just writing. (“They” also say that December is the time for editing.) This will be a super huge challenge for me because I have a hard time leaving a chapter.

The posts here might be even more infrequent than usual – but that will be a good thing because it will mean I am writing The Alligator Purse. Yippeeee!

All literary genres considered.
Winner(s) selected by independent, third party judges.
Submissions limited to 5,000 words.
A $25 submission fee will be charged.

The Award TimelineSubmissions for the 2012 Prize will be accepted through November 30, 2012.
The short list will be posted by mid-February 2013.
The winner will be announced on March 30, 2013.
The winner will visit France for the month of July, 2013.
Submissions for the 2013 Prize will be accepted beginning December 1, 2012.

(And you know the drill, right – I am not endorsing this contest – just passing along the info – if you want to apply, you might want to check out the details first and decide for yourself whether or not to enter. 😎 )

You can put in selection criteria that will narrow suggestions to a manageable number.

And now you are wondering why I am so so smart. Ha. I have an answer for that too. I am taking a class from Caitlin Alexander thru Media Bistro. She was an editor at Random House for over a decade so she knows a little somthin, somthin.

And then I can only say good luck – it ain’t easy. But it is critical.